Michael Moran

The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper-Innovation

For the first two thirds of the twentieth century, British government was among the most stable in the advanced industrial world. In the last three decades, the governing arrangements have been in turmoil and the country has been a pioneer in economic reform, and in public sector change. In this book, Michael Moran examines and explains the contrast between these two epochs. What turned Britain into a laboratory of political innovation? Britain became a formal democracy at the start of the twentieth century but the practice of government remained oligarchic. From the 1970s this oligarchy collapsed under the pressure of economic crisis. The British regulatory state is being constructed in its place. Moran challenges the prevailing view that this new state is liberal or decentralizing. Instead he argues that it is a new, threatening kind of interventionist state which is colonizing, dominating, and centralizing hitherto independent domains of civil society. The book is essential reading for all those interested in British political development and in the nature and impact of regulation.

Review Article: Understanding the Regulatory State

misunderstanding the regulatory state?In the last quarter of the twentieth century something transformed government across the advanced capitalist world, and a large amount of comparative political enquiry is now concerned with pinning a convincing label on that transformation. Of the many candidates the subject of this review article has proved especially popular. As I will show, a regulatory state is now commonly said to exist in a wide range of geographical and institutional settings: writers speak of a regulatory state in the United States and in Britain; of the European regulatory state; and even of refinements like ‘a regulatory state inside the state’.

Misrule of experts? The financial crisis as elite debacle

Abstract This paper is about knowledge limits and the financial crisis. It begins by examining various existing accounts of crisis which disagree about the causes, but share the belief that the crisis represents a problem of socio-technical malfunction which requires some kind of technocratic fix: the three variants on this explanation are the crisis as accident, conspiracy or calculative failure. This paper proposes an alternative explanation which frames the crisis differently as an elite political debacle. Political and technocratic elites were hubristically detached from the process of financial innovation as it took the form of ‘bricolage’, which put finance beyond technical control or management. The paper raises fundamental questions about the politicized role of technocrats after the 1980s and emphasizes the need to bring private finance and its public regulators under democratic political control whose technical precondition is a dramatic simplification of finance.

Policy Emergence and Policy Convergence: The Case of ‘Scientific-Bureaucratic Medicine’ in the United States and United Kingdom

This article examines how the rather similar approaches to the management of medical care (which here we term ‘scientific-bureaucratic medicine’) emerged within the public-policy agendas of both the United Kingdom and United States during the 1990s. In particular, we address the theoretical puzzle of how explanations of policy emergence in single countries can be reconciled with policy convergence between two countries.

Interdisciplinarity and Political Science1

‘Interdisciplinarity’ is an ancient notion in the social sciences, but has acquired both pedagogic and policy popularity in recent decades. Paradoxically, it only makes sense in a disciplinary world. The disciplines have been greatly strengthened in recent decades, and interdisciplinarity can partly be understood as a response by interests threatened by disciplinarity. It is also a strategy used by disciplines in crisis, and by dissidents from disciplinary hierarchies.

Politics and governance in the UK

Introduction Why Politics Matters and Why British Politics Matters? British Politics: The Historical Context Economy and Society Britain and the World The Constitution and the Political Culture The European Political System The Core Executive in the Westminster System Departments and Agencies in the Westminster System Representing Interests in the Westminster System Parliament in the Westminster System The Devolved System of Governance The Worlds of Local and Regional Government: Multi-Level Governance in Action How Citizens Participate Parties and Their Organisation Parties and Their Ideologies How Political Communications Happens How Elections Are Decided How Leaders Are Elected Understanding Policy Under Multi-Level Governance Understanding Policy: Framing Policy Controversies Raising and Allocating Resources The State, Public Order and Security The State and the Citizen Understanding the British State

The state and the financial services revolution: A comparative analysis

The creation of a single European market in financial services is a small part of a bigger story: the financial services revolution in the leading financial centres of the advanced capitalist world. A revolution usually pictured in the language of deregulation is in reality something very different: a series of seismic changes in regulatory structures caused by the combined ambitions of corporate actors and national governments. Regulation is driven both by struggles for competitive advantage and by the pressures of democratic politics. The result is a regulatory system which is highly unstable.

Three Faces of the Health Care State

That health care is a subsystem of the welfare state has dominated the study of states and health care policy. But this conception omits two other faces of the state--as a putatively democratic organization and as the manager of industrial economies in a capitalist world. Policy can be analyzed fruitfully in terms of the tensions between these three faces of the health care state.

Crises of the Welfare State

‘The essence of the welfare state’, wrote Wilensky in a classic study, ‘is government-protected minimum standards of income, nutrition, health, housing, and education, assured to every citizen’. This innocent definition is, we shall see, highly contestable, but it has the merit of putting into a few words the most important characteristics of modern welfare states: that they necessarily involve some model of citizenship; that they provide a stream of services for people called citizens; and that they use public power to raise the resources for those services and to organize their provision. If there is a crisis of the welfare state it has to involve, in other words, a crisis of citizenship, or a crisis in the capacity of states to raise resources and to transform those resources into services.

Falling from a Tightrope: Doctors and Lawyers between the Market and the State

The organization of the medical and legal professions in Britain has depended heavily on ideologies of self-regulation, and on different institutional creations inspired by those ideologies. Self-regulation balances professions between the market and the state. In recent years both medicine and the law have been subjected to greater competition in the market, and greater control by the state. Part of the explanation for change lies in conditions particular to medicine and law but the similarity in recent regulatory experiences can only be explained by the working of common external forces. Two are identified: the impact of long-term cultural change on a regulatory balancing act originally created in an undemocratic and hierarchical society; and the impact of a modernizing elite in British government seeking to use state power to reverse the decline in British competitiveness.